5 Idealism and Naturalism in the Nineteenth Century

5 Idealism and Naturalism in the Nineteenth Century Sebastian Gardner 1. Introduction The nineteenth century may be regarded as comprising the first chapter in the story, as it must appear to us now, of idealism’s long-term decline and of the eventual ascent within the analytic tradition of a confident and sophisticated naturalism.1 The chief landmarks of both developments are fairly clear. The former begins with Kant’s Critical Philosophy and the great systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, a rich legacy which is re-explored continuously over the course of the century and provides the basis for myriad novel positions, leading in the final quarter of the nineteenth century to a renaissance of absolute idealism in Anglo-American philosophy. The story of the growth of naturalism may be taken to begin with Auguste Comte and to develop through John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer to Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach, receiving an important impetus from the mid-century German materialism of Karl Vogt, Ludwig Bu¨chner, Jacob Moleschott and Heinrich Czolbe (see Gregory 1977), as well as of course, after the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which found forceful advocates in figures such as Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Haeckel. The neo-Kantian development which established itself in Germany from the 1860s and 1870s onwards has a place in the trajectories of both idealism and naturalism. Both of these narratives, sketched here in the briefest outline, require elaboration not merely through the addition of numerous other and less salient figures and movements but also through an account of their context: namely, the exponential growth of scientific knowledge witnessed in the nineteenth century, especially in physics, physiology and experimental psychology, together with the profound cultural shift accompanying the achievements and industrial applications of modern science, to which belongs the erosion of the institutional bases of Christian theism and demise of its intellectual authority. Closely bound up with these developments is the cultural dissemination of what might be called ‘practical naturalism’ – the view, reborn with the Enlightenment, that the true Good is of an exclusively worldly nature and its realisation fostered by scientific modernity. What I propose to do in this chapter, in place of attempting to fill out the historical detail of each of the developments independently, is to concentrate on instances where they interact or come into significant contact. More exactly, my focus will be on Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. University Press. © 2011. Edinburgh Copyright philosophers of the period who did not simply and straightforwardly pursue either of the two tendencies but instead regarded the relation of natural scientific knowledge to metaphysical speculation as posing a problem not to be solved by coming down simply on Stone, Alison. Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. : Edinburgh University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central. Web. 8 July 2016. Created from UCL on 2016-07-08 02:42:10. 90 sebastian gardner one side rather than the other and so advanced positions which responded in a creative fashion to the competing claims of idealism and naturalism, in some cases offering a kind of fusion. This approach, I will suggest, allows us to identify what it was that formed for nineteenth-century philosophy, to the extent that one can generalise over such a period, the crux of the opposition of idealism and naturalism. Because the main locus of developments at the intersection of idealism and naturalism was Germany, the figures I shall discuss belong chiefly to German philosophy. The order of discussion is loosely chronological but I shall depart from the strict historical sequence where doing so helps to give the historical territory a clearer systematic shape. 2. Nature versus Freedom: Classical German Philosophy Although anticipations can be located in early modern and even ancient philosophy, the opposition of idealism and naturalism, as it was understood in the nineteenth century, had its origin in classical German philosophy. Kant famously asserts in the Introduction to the Critique of Judgement of 1790 that ‘there is an incalculable gulf fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible’ (Kant [1790] 2000: 63). While conceding that something must be done by way of constructing a connecting link from the one domain to the other – the overarching aim of the third Critique, Kant says, is to show that ‘nature must be conceived in such a way that the lawfulness of its form is at least in agreement with the possibility of ends that are to be realised in it in accordance with the laws of freedom’ – Kant regards it as inconceivable, for human as opposed to divine reason, that Nature and Freedom should be cognised as comprising two parts of a single unified reality. This opposition of ontological realms – or, to the extent that our concern is with representations rather than their objects, of two domains of concepts and judgement – corresponds to and underpins the opposition of idealism and naturalism as philosophical or metaphilosophical positions. In so far as Nature and Freedom are considered to be not contiguous, mutually cohering realities but rather – by virtue of the principles and forms of explanation which they mandate – in metaphysical competition, they provide the basis for an exclusive disjunction: either we take the side of Nature, yielding the thesis that all existents are subject to natural law and that all true explanation is natural scientific in form; or we take that of Freedom, yielding the denial that Nature, as conceived in the terms of empirical natural science, is ontologically or explanatorily comprehensive and the affirmation that human subjectivity is non-natural yet irreducibly real. A more ambitious form of idealism will add that subjectivity itself supplies the grounds, if not ontological then at least conceptual, of Nature. On each alternative, the competition of Nature and Freedom is resolved by taking one of the pair to encompass the other. Kant himself does not draw up the philosophical geography in exactly these terms. The highest opposition of (meta)philosophical positions recognised by Kant is that of transcendental idealism, his own standpoint, to transcendental realism, whose forms are legion and of which naturalism is only one. Nor is naturalism, in the sense that the term has for us now, regarded by Kant as of special interest and importance. Kant concerns himself variously with materialism, scepticism, empiricism and other standpoints which deny validity to pure reason and so annul the reality of Freedom and he in addition recognises an entrenched tendency in Copyright © 2011. Edinburgh University Press. All rights reserved. University Press. © 2011. Edinburgh Copyright human reason (at the level of natural consciousness as much as thatof philosophical reflection) to assimilate all objects of thought to empirical objects, but he does not envisage a position which seeks to appropriate philosophically the epistemological prestige of the natural sciences Stone, Alison. Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. : Edinburgh University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central. Web. 8 July 2016. Created from UCL on 2016-07-08 02:42:10. idealism and naturalism 91 in the manner characteristic of naturalism as we now know it. In large part this is because Kant took his own position to accommodate as fully as can reasonably be demanded the distinctive epistemic authority of natural science: subsequent to the Critique,intheMetaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786 and in the notes published as Opus Postumum,Kant attempted to show that his transcendental analysis of the conditions of experience could be extended to provide natural science with its basic concepts and principles. Kant’s organisation of the field of philosophical debate makes sense to the extent that one keeps in view and wishes to take issue with the huge number of ‘dogmatic’ but non- naturalistic pre-Kantian metaphysical positions, from Plato to Leibniz, in order to be able to present transcendental idealism as a novel, comprehensive and final solution to the problems of philosophy. But once the lesson of Kant’s critique of supersensible metaphysics has been absorbed – once it has been accepted that metaphysics as an enterprise of theoretical reason is a vain endeavour, which can survive only in the attenuated form of transcendental idealism’s system of principles of possible experience – and when in addition it is recognised that Kantian idealism is open to challenge from proto-naturalistic, Humean and Spinozistic quarters, as had been demonstrated in the early reception of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason, the philosophical landscape changes. We then arrive at a view according to which the philosophical options divide cleanly and exhaustively between idealism and naturalism. This is the picture presented by Fichte, whom we find maintaining in 1797 that at the ultimate limit of philosophical reflection an opposition is confronted between ‘idealism’ – which, according to Fichte, is necessarily transcendental in character and treats the free non-empirical subject as the universal philosophical explanans – and ‘dogmatism’, defined by its commitment to explaining subjectivity

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